Vienna Talks: Complex Array of Arms Issues Plus an East of Many Voices

By SERGE SCHMEMANN, Special to The New York Times

Published: July 7, 1989

VIENNA, June 30—
To appreciate the complexity of the effort to reduce Europe's conventional arms, take disarmament at its most basic as two adversaries trying to agree to lay down their knives.

Then imagine 23 adversaries of every conceivable size and disposition, divided into two uneven teams and wielding hundreds of thousands of weapons so diverse that they do not always agree how to classify them, and you get a hint of the challenge facing the talks here between East and West.

Then take the fact that President Bush recently set a target of 6 to 12 months for reaching an agreement, add the fact that both superpowers have put forward dramatic initiatives, and the result is what veterans of the East-West rivalry agree may be some of the most interesting arms-control talks since the war.

''This is a real live negotiation, I would say a really exciting negotiation,'' said Stephen J. Ledogar, the negotiator who heads the American team to the talks. ''You could go on leave for a week and come back and be really behind.'' Little Hope for Early Pact

Few negotiators expect that a treaty can be signed in 12 months, as Mr. Bush proposed. The President made his proposals in broad strokes, and the details remain to be worked out. Thus only part of the new NATO proposal is expected to be ready to be presented to the East by the end of the current session on July 13, and the full package will probably be handed to the East when talks resume Sept. 7.

But Mr. Bush's date has given the talks a tangible sense of urgency. If not a deadline, negotiators say it has provided a target against which to measure progress. The talks on conventional arms have also gained new momentum with the West German eagerness to eliminate short-range missiles on German soil. The West has said it will not negotiate on these short-range missiles until the Soviet superiority in conventional forces - now estimated at two-to-one in troops and tanks - has been eliminated.

The mandate of the talks, which opened March 9, is to reach an agreement between the 16 members of the North Atlantic alliance and the 7 members of the Warsaw Pact on reducing the numbers of soldiers and non-nuclear weapons across all Europe, ''from the Atlantic to the Urals,'' to something approaching parity.

The talks, known formally as the Negotiation on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, are successors to the ill-fated Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction negotiations that were quietly abandoned in February after 15 inconclusive years.

Several critical differences, however, have made the current talks as dynamic as the preceding ones were moribund. For one thing, the preceding negotiations covered only Central Europe, and France was not a participant. France Agrees to Take Part

The new talks in effect cover all Europe. And for the first time since France left the NATO unified command in 1966, the French agreed to take part in East-West arms talks -though to camouflage the move, they insisted that the talks be officially labeled as negotiations among 23 independent nations and that they be linked to the 35-country Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

A second difference came with the American-Soviet agreement to eliminate land-based medium-range nuclear weapons from Europe and the West German eagerness to eliminate the remaining short-range missiles, which led to the West's insistence on a conventional-arms agreement.

The last and probably most tangible difference has been the change in the Eastern camp under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. It was Mr. Gorbachev who first put forth the notion of reductions ''from the Atlantic to the Urals,'' and even before the current Vienna talks opened, the Soviet leader and several of his allies announced substantial unilateral reductions of forces in Europe, including the withdrawal of 12,000 tanks, 9,100 artillery pieces and an unspecified number of armored personnel carriers.

Since the talks opened, the Soviet side has made several proposals that have significantly narrowed the conceptual differences with the West. Soviets Loosen Reins

Mr. Gorbachev also loosened the taut reins Moscow used to keep on its allies, leaving negotiators in both camps with the novel experience of an Eastern side talking in many voices.

''There is an enormous change in the East,'' said a senior West German negotiator. ''They function less as a bloc than we do. Sometimes there seems to be more pluralism in the East than in the West. We all stick rigorously to the general strategy, but Hungary, for one, has made a policy of speaking for itself, and the Poles too have become more independent.''

The most recent, and to many the most unexpected, impetus to the talks was the initiative announced by Mr. Bush in Brussels at the NATO summit meeting in May. Pressed on one side by Mr. Gorbachev's headline-grabbing initiatives and from the other by a newly assertive West Germany, Mr. Bush made a surprise proposal that accepted Moscow's basic demand to include troops, helicopters and planes in the agreement.